Quoth Kevin Williamson, in re some pretty typical bunko artistry in the press:

I have made the point here a dozen times — and you’d think that one of these big-on-science guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye would take up the cause — that there is in reality an important federal project under way giving rank pseudoscience and pure hokum the force of law: Obamacare, which, thanks to the efforts of Senator Tom Harkin (D., Iowa), will oblige taxpayers to subsidize all manner of scientifically illegitimate “alternative medicine.” Everybody wants to know what Scott Walker and Sarah Palin think about evolution, but almost nobody is asking what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama think about homeopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and the like. The same people who are scandalized that Walker doesn’t want to talk about something that he doesn’t know the first thing about celebrate as the most important health-care advance in a generation a law that treats as legitimate sundry species of quackery based in pure mysticism.

(source: Evolution of a Tactic | National Review Online)

I, for one, look forward to the day when we all finally realize that the enlightened maharajas of the PPACA dynasty have restored the gift of the maji to its true medical function after millennia of use in home cooking and ritual incense.

Or perhaps I will continue to believe in a God who heals–and who leads doctors to study medicine.

(source: Event)

So, I went to an interesting talk last night, and it raised a question for me that I would likely have tried to formulate for the panel, if it had not been a room full of students rather than (as I would have liked) a room full of interested scholars (and their students).

Michael Thompson, speaking from a white Southern Baptist perspective, laid out the general perspective shared by many Christians and evangelicals:  that “the Jesus movement” had a “high moral standard” that led Christians to reject the exposure of infants, and ultimately to reject slavery, although Christians were certainly not consistently above reproach.

Eric Gill, speaking from the perspective of a scholar and youth pastor in “the Black Church,” argued that the black church as such had a “minimal role” in the Civil Rights Movement, for reasons essential to its role as an institution that organized both enslaved and segregated African-Americans into a community.  His most accessible example, for me, was the demurral of most leaders of black churches in Alabama to join in desegregation activism, leaving the task to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose leadership in civil rights activism was contrary to a strong cultural principle that “youth don’t lead.”

Lawrence Ware, responding and moderating, expressed significant hesitation about accepting Gill’s thesis, given the persistence of “Reverend” in the names of civil rights leaders; and he asked Thompson what could be done.  But it was in the course of Ware’s own response that I heard what, as it unfolded, made me want to ask a question.

Ware adopted the sense of “theological reflection” that emerges from Tillich or Ricoeur, suggesting that (as Gill had noted) the arrival of Black Liberation Theology in the work of James Cone was the theological dimension of the black church’s involvement in the civil rights movement.  He noted that “lived experience is the prism” through which the sacred text is interpreted, so that “it is no surprise that the enslaved read the Bible differently than those who enslave them.”  Given the significant number of black civil rights leaders who were also leaders in the black church, Ware thought it useful to “push back” against Gill’s thesis.

Gill’s defense, however, pointed out that the nature of the black church as a community institution could not help but be transformed by the civil-rights movement, and that there were significant trade-offs. Continue reading →

“Would you say … ‘We/I just need to work the kinks out’ if you knew that sentiment was rooted in racism. Kinky hair is beautiful. Natural hair is powerful,” reads one.

(source: National Review Online | Print)

I honestly try to spend as little time as possible venting grievances against the perpetually aggrieved.  Two main reasons for this are that, in many cases, the heat of controversy generates more trouble than the fad-of-the-moment; there is just no reason to spend a lot of effort picking needles off a cactus (better to figure out whether the cactus needs healing, transplanting, or replacing).  And also, to be frank, a lot of the awkward and obnoxious bureaucratic nonsense that grows over these issues is a response to what are very real misunderstandings and sufferings for a lot of people, people on either “side” of whatever the issue seems to be.

Along with that, of course, I do think it’s important to avoid giving offense whenever possible.  It shouldn’t need saying, but–well, here we are.

But once in a while, it just gets to be too much.  The sheer ignorance passing as knowledge, overlaid on the sheer unwillingness to pass on real knowledge, erupts into high-visibility folly that we shouldn’t pass without comment.

So, at the risk of being pedantic, let me indulge in a bit of quite literal pedantry.

To “work the kinks out” is in no sense racist. Continue reading →

In a world in which we feel compelled to identify with the grossly offensive Charlie Hebdo in the name of free speech, why can’t we identify with a professor or a student who voices unpopular views?

(source: Hang Together | “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Benjamin Franklin)

I want to agree with my fellow blogger.  I will point toward one tentative post taking note of the matter, and based on past experience I would expect a follow-up post eventually.  I find that I am usually in agreement with FIRE, and when both FIRE and AAUP weigh in on the same side, I am fairly confident that there is more here than just smoke.

There is little question in my mind that the equities in the larger situation tip in favor of McAdams, and I hope he is able to find a sane and stable situation at the end of all this froth and ferment.

Let me admit, though, that with regard to the immediate instance there are two respects in which I hesitate to roar out in full-throated support of McAdams. Continue reading →

In the course of this mildly interesting article (related to this absolutely fascinating area of research), I find a reference to the following:

[T]he constellation of challenges created by population growth […] have contributed to a rebirth of the profoundly misguided philosophy espoused by Thomas Malthus, an English priest and economist who lived during the late 18^th Century. In 1798, Malthus argued that human population always grows more rapidly than the human food supply until war, disease or famine reduces the number of people. He was wrong – and spectacularly so.

(source: Thomas Malthus: Wrong Yesterday, Right Today? – Forbes)

And I stay with this topic a moment, because it seems worthwhile to notice that Malthus, as an Anglican cleric and man of his times, could be critiqued on other grounds, too.  Continue reading →